Cutting different dresses from paper sheets and mounting those paper dresses onto two dimensional figures formed from card board material is a known form of play activity for young females that provides hours of amusement. That play activity provides the child with intellectual stimulation and a learning experience, yet is simple and requires only limited dexterity.
In more modern times that play activity has also been practiced with dolls of three dimensional form, the now ever present plastic fashion dolls, which are available with a wardrobe of clothing sized to fit. The child may dress and undress the doll in endless variety; for visiting friends, for playing baseball, as a bride, a doctor in limitless variety. As one appreciates it requires some dexterity of the child to dress a plastic doll. While that activity is generally accomplished by girls of eight years of age and up, who seem to possess sufficient dexterity by that age, for younger girls, that is not usually the case. Though pre-school age girls may generally find it possible to undress the doll, dressing the doll is found more difficult and the child is usually unsuccessful.
Doll makers have long sought to discover a suitable structure to make the doll easier to dress and undress in order to make that play activity available to younger girls. The prospect of a young child's appreciative smile and an expanded market for doll product has long provided more than ample encouragement for the doll manufacturer to reach that achievement. As example of one such attempt, the "My First Barbie" doll employed straight legs so that a child could more easily pull a garment up from the bottom over the dolls torso, avoiding the interference that a bendable doll leg could cause the child. Others have suggested use of an adhesive so that the garment may be simply stuck to the doll's torso. However, a sticky doll torso was found unacceptable for obvious reasons.
The present invention offers a novel solution. It provides the means for a pre-school age child to easily dress the doll.
An object of the present invention is to provide a doll whose outer garment may be easily be changed requiring only the limited dexterity level characteristic of a pre-school aged child to accomplish a perceived change the change of clothes.
An ancillary object of the invention is to provide a novel structure in a doll's clothing garment and a novel doll structure to hold the doll clothing in place for quickly and easily dressing the doll structure and then re-dressing the doll.